Azuma-uta
by Mirriem
Summary: In the world of spirits, a messenger of a bygone era brings foreboding tidings. In the world of the living, life goes on after the Winter War. In shadowed corners and out of sight, a spirit starves in the darkness. A five-part tale of mystery and secrets, with just a dash of fright.
1. Chapter 1

**Azuma-uta**

_Of the one I love,_

_in all truth what shall I say?_

_On Musashi Plain_

_the wild ovate blossoms_

_are all blowing, timelessly._

* * *

The missive came by a bird small enough to fit in the palm of Sasakibe's hand, though its long tail rested neatly along most of his forearm. Though it was not alive, it had been crafted with delicate care. The dark crest and the ring of sharp blue around the brilliant blackness of its eye were so convincingly real that he wondered, absurdly, how an animal of the southern islands could be in Seireitei up until the moment its petite beak parted and a voice echoed:

"_A woman goes hungry on the Eastern Frontier."_

Then he remembered, and shock and clarity made him blanch like a student of a thousand years ago. He shouldn't have forgotten; whether or not the delay between missives was ten years or a hundred years – and it had been a hundred years, hadn't it? Nearly so – the black bird of paradise with its white belly and its single verse were worthy of his full and undivided attention.

They were also worthy of a bed of sweat at his temple and a brief, uncontrollable tremor.

"Vice-Captain…?"

He took a breath. A deep, long, calming breath. He curled his fingers under the bird and it adjusted its perch, to better withstand the abrupt turn that he made. He shook his head once, dismissing his subordinate…Akane, yes, that was her name. She wore plum blossoms in her hair and seemed immensely confused over his reaction to messenger as old, outdated, and bizarre as this one.

"Thank you. I will take it to the Captain-Commander myself."

The hallways of the First Division were hardly empty, but he could have sworn that his steps reverberated too loudly, as though through a great silence that stretched back many years.

* * *

Three months was long enough for it to feel like it'd been forever. Forever since pain and desperation and determination, forever since the do-or-die lunge toward the distant, unimaginable and yet necessary hope for victory. Forever since a fake ruin had stretched out beneath his feet, just familiar enough to terrify him. _This could have been the future_, the rubble of false Karakura Town had told him, even though he'd known that not even a single stone would have been left behind if he'd lost. _This is what happens when you go to war._

Now, with his back against the grass and his arms thrown carelessly out to rest on the hill above his head, Ichigo could just about taste the flat, bitter taste of disbelief and time. Everything had happened, it had absolutely happened, but maybe it had happened to someone else, someone that could walk on air and talk to the dead. It wasn't a great feeling. Not the _worst_ worst, especially when compared to the nightmare vision of an empty crater and a hundred thousand dead, but he'd be worse than a liar if he claimed that he was completely fine. It felt like he got a little less fine over time, as though thin layers of mental well-being where sheared away each day, sometimes by the sight of Ishida sprinting over power lines and sometimes whenever he noticed Karin's increasingly frequent pauses over nothing.

It felt a little pathetic.

_Pathetic is running off by yourself and not telling anyone_, said a voice that sounded a little like Rukia. It wasn't the first time he'd heard it, but it _was _the first time he was able to stop himself from wishing that it was.

"She'll come when she can," he said, more or less to the sky. The sunset was darkening the horizon, rich purples ringing a plate of bronze and gold that cast the familiar silhouette of the Karakura skyline as a stark shadow. "Three months is barely enough time to put all the squads back together. People are probably only just now getting out of bed."

"Oho…? Is it really so short a time?"

Ichigo sighed, and frowned deeply, his pinched expression showing a trace of his typically smothered discomfort. He'd harbored his doubts, it was true; Unohana could accomplish what looked like miracles while on the battlefield, how long would it really take for everyone to recover when the fight was actually over? There could be paperwork and a good chunk of the Gotei 13 to rebuild, but did that really leave no time for a visit?

But it was selfish wasn't it, to think that way? He pressed his palms to his eyes, the knot of unhappiness an unfamiliar weight in his chest. _Let it go already. Let it go. This is what you wanted._ "…maybe. I think so. A lot of people were hurt."

"But you are not?"

"Not…like that." And besides, the wounds of his spiritual body didn't exactly carry over to his physical one. About the only sign left that he'd gone through any of that at all was the hard shape in his back pocket and the fact that he could sprint to school and not break a sweat.

"Like what?"

"Like…" Like a part of him had been excised and leveraged as payment, except he'd known, he'd _chosen _it, and being anything other than relieved was –

_Wait._

Shock bolted through Ichigo and he flailed his way upright, grass in his hair and his eyes bulging. _Who - ?!_ His head spun first one way – toward the street and the long, gleaming stretch of the Onose River – and then the other, toward the bridge on his right. First glance revealed only the scenery he'd started with: an old, pock-marked amalgam of wood and concrete, a relic from sixty years ago when trains were light and slow enough for that particular structure to handle. It'd been out of use for ages, left only as a path for pedestrians and bikes, though the broad, splintered slats and the rusted tracks that lay across them were closed off by a fence. They really should have been demolished years ago.

There was no one on the path. Ichigo felt for a moment a high, shaken feeling, an idea, a _hope_ darting through his brain as quick as bird or a flash of light.

But it was gone a breath later, blinked away as his eyes adjusted and he saw in the darkness under the bridge a man he didn't recognize. Not thinking, he opened his mouth to yell, to demand, anger and embarrassment and a sense of exposure causing his fists to curl, but all the bluster fizzled out before he could utter more than stunted: "…eh?"

The guy looked like a clown.

No, no that wasn't quite right. More like, he looked like he belonged in a circus, or a play, or a period drama where an inept costuming department had gotten their eras confused. Most of him was still cast in shadow, but slanted bars of sunlight fell across him through the gaps in the train tracks, and in those Ichigo could make out the lurid colors of draped and heavy fabric, long hair pinned with jewels and flourish, and what had to be more than a few layers of makeup. His inner Keigo screeched _It's a crossdresser, Ichigo! Look out!_ but that was both rude and unwanted, because the last thing he needed was a mental version of Keigo to go along with anybody else making demands in his head.

Even if he seemed to be sort of right, for a mental projection. Long lashes settled on a pale, powdered cheek and a small mouth – his upper lip was painted, too; blue, or maybe purple? – curled into an equally small smile as he chuckled quietly.

His voice was deep, and in no hurry. "Sorry…sorry. You looked as though you needed a conversation."

Ichigo's fist lowered at the same time his eyebrows did, and at about the same pace. "…what."

"Maybe not?" A long finger was placed on his chin; his nail was painted, and likely fake. "But then why ask?"

Ichigo's surprise began to evolve into irritation, but an echo of that high feeling remained, jolting oddly in his chest. He didn't reply and instead looked at him again, this time with twice the intensity and twice the care. Nothing about the outlandish outfit changed, not from the tips of his blue tabi to the waved strains of hair that covered his ears, but Ichigo knew, despite the now-familiar absence of any extra sense of power or spirit. He'd been through too much not to know. In the end, he kept the answer to the man's possibly rhetorical question to himself and pushed against the ground to climb to his feet, taking his bookbag with him. He used the action to think, and think quickly, the melancholy of minutes ago dying and fading. He wasn't sorry to see it go and he didn't have the time nor the desire to think about how much more comfortable the tension pulling at his muscles was in comparison. The sudden pounding in his chest was something he knew without having to think too hard about it, and the other-life memories abruptly didn't feel so far away anymore.

A man in bizarre clothes who just appeared and made obtuse comments about apparently nothing, except it was at an exact moment when his guard was down and the secrets about his life were about to slip past his lips? _How stupid do they think I am?_

Urahara had fooled him the first time. Shinji had gotten him pretty good the second time.

If this was a third time, Ichigo wasn't going to fall for it. He drew in a long breath through his nose, leaned back, stuffed his free hand in his pocket, and then turned around to face the top of the hill. "…how about this. I'm going to go to the café two streets down from here. I'm going to get something to eat. Then I'm going to go home and lock all my doors and windows. If somebody wants something from me, they can come talk to me while I'm eating."

Instinct told him turning his back was the worst idea, but Ichigo made the climb up the hill look casual and easy. He didn't look back and he didn't stop.

The man under the bridge watched him go, his fingers curled over his chin.

* * *

**Chapter 1/5**


	2. Chapter 2

**Azuma-uta**

_Even though my hands_

_are rough from much rice-pounding,_

_on this night again_

_my master's son will clasp them_

_with a heavy, broken sigh._

* * *

That morning, Rukia had seen something strange.

The last several weeks had been nothing if not atypical, that was very true. The barely-controlled administrative chaos in the wake of the most dangerous conflict Soul Society had ever known had turned everything on its head. From the complicated and immediate necessity of switching and dismantling the entirety of a false town to the basic and urgent concerns like the medical care of not only most of the ranking members of the Gotei 13, but the several hundred humans that had been partially exposed to Aizen's reiatsu, the first two weeks alone had resulted in constant activity, day and night, rain or shine. Anyone that could still stand and hold a sword, a stack of paper, or a bundle of supplies had been pressed into service, including Academy students and anyone with a shovel.

There was also a crater out in the wilds beyond the fringes of Rukongai that no one wanted to go near. The mountainous landscape had, aside from the massive scar that was big enough to swallow a district, remained largely the same, but there was a _feeling_ about it now, an unsettling buzzing on the back of the neck of anyone that possessed spiritual power of any kind. It was like reiatsu, like but not quite, heavy as lead and flickering blackly on the edges of one's vision.

Rukia had seen and been around enough getsugas to know what one felt like, but the remains of Ichigo's battle against their greatest enemy were so unfathomably vast and dense that very few wanted to survey the damage, much less work on dissipating it. The general acknowledgement that it was a mark of beneficence and accomplishment, of _victory_, couldn't quite dispel the discomfort of knowing that such power could exist.

_Had existed_. Rukia had tried to stress that point, with little success outside of the circle of people that Ichigo had met and befriended personally. She could understand the quiet, guiltily repressed fear, given how closely all of Soul Society had come to ruin because of uncontrollable power; as always, some things were slow to change.

So it was that she took up the survey duty herself when time and other missions had allowed, and so it was that she was awake and traveling – quickly, because she was tired and sorely wanted a bath to deal with the dust of two days' worth of work – through the streets of Seireitei in the very early morning. She saw the bird only from a distance, and gave it little thought, her mind filing the black shape into the same category as the jigokucho that flittered about. They were dozens constantly on the move now, a reflection of the endless bustle in the wake of the war, and yet another at this hour was nothing to pay much attention to. She knew for a fact that the Fourth Division had yet to officially close its doors for any reason, not with staff and kido experts that specialized on memory augmentation constantly going in and out. As of their last report, only fifty or so humans remained months down the line, strictly those most severely affected that had somehow still survived such a close brush with death; maintaining the illusion of their presence in the real world while continuing their treatment in Soul Society required the collaboration of three divisions.

She did note, in an automatic way, that the bird was flying down from the imposing figure of the First Division headquarters.

However, the second, more pressing question didn't get asked until two hours later, when she was putting a comb through her wet hair – _So troublesome; should I have it cut? _– and the stronger sunlight of the daytime was beginning to chase the night's chill away from the manor.

"…a bird?"

Rukia stopped, her hands lowering to her lap. "When did we start – "

"Rukia."

Her little shriek was brief but embarrassing, her jump moreso. However, neither appeared to register nor matter to the tall figure standing in her doorway. The angle of the light cast his face and much of the rest of him in shadow, but of course it could be only one man.

"N…Nii-sama, what is – " She began, and then stopped abruptly, the little oddities of the coming abruptly coming to a head.

Perched on Byakuya's shoulder was the bird from that morning. It was currently occupied with a brisk preening, fitting black feathers through a diminutive beak. "…that?"

"A summons," he answered in a terse tone that, a year ago, would have intimidated her into silence and obedience. Today, it only galvanized her to action, especially considering he had come himself instead of sending one of the household staff. She set aside her comb and got promptly to her feet, dismissing her fatigue. She could sleep later.

"A mission? So soon?"

"It is atypical." Byakuya turned toward the messenger and the small, false animal stopped its busywork and looked at them both, first curving its head one way, and then the other. Its eyes were dark as volcanic stones.

It said: _"Well met on the plain of the evening, friends of old houses."_

She stopped mid-stoop to recover her zanpakutou, hesitation and confusion tugging at the business-like focus in her expression. The voice she didn't recognize, other than as a list of basic traits: masculine, of intermediate age, with halting phrasing. "A…poem?"

"A greeting." Byakuya lifted his hand, and the bird promptly perched on the curve of his knuckles. "It is a special courier used only when Soul Society must receive an important personage. Each individual or body has a unique messenger."

"I've never seen any such messengers…"

"Only this one is left," he said, and his pause seemed to indicate the end of his explanation. But Byakuya's features moved, just slightly; his frown was subtle but discernable. "I saw it once, when I was a boy."

Rukia controlled her surprised glance, but only barely. He never spoke of his childhood, which made Captain Ukitake's occasional stories all the more shocking and secret.

"Father performed the greeting then." The faint lightness of recollection left his voice after that, and Byakuya turned and swung his arm in a slow arc. The bird lifted up and away in a flutter of dusky feathers, its long tail trailing gracefully behind. "It is traditional for one of the noble houses to receive the guest or send a delegation to the chosen meeting place. We are going."

So not a mission at all? A ceremony? _Now _uncertainty danced in her chest. When had she last acted as a member of the Kuchiki family and not a Shinigami? Not since she graduated from the Academy, that was for certain. There was no doubt that there'd be reams of written records that concerned how to act and in what fashion, but only her powerful curiosity kept her from wishing it'd been some remnant, low-ranking Arrancar to deal with instead. "Where?"

"Karakura Town."

Rukia's hasty, internal review of etiquette and dress came to an immediate and stuttering halt.

"W…_what?_"

* * *

"Aaggh."

Ichigo turned one way.

"Nnn. Nnnnaaaghhh."

He rolled the other way and hugged his pillow closer to his chest.

"AaaauuuGGGHHH – "

"Did a girl stand you up or something?"

Ichigo lurched in surprise. In fact, he lurched so hard he fell out of his bed entirely, taking his sheet and his pillow with him. A second later he was up, pillow raised and red bright on his face.

"Karin! What the hell happened to _knocking?!_"

The soon-to-be middle school student only shrugged, a toothbrush sticking out of one corner of her mouth and a bored slant to her brows. "You were moaning too loud. Am I supposed to knock first when I check to see if you're dying?"

She said it even as she was already turning around and shrugging her way out, mission essentially accomplished. Ichigo had the urge to yell at least one more time, but she was right, and getting angry at his sister because a weirdo hadn't met up with him to make ambiguous and likely dangerous demands was stupid. So, instead of shouting, he ground both hands through his hair and wondered why the hell he was even upset. Yeah, the guy stood him up. A drink, a sandwich, a too-sweet dessert, and a cup of coffee later, he hadn't seen so much as a hint of ridiculous purple anywhere in the cafe. That wasn't _necessarily _a bad thing, except now Ichigo was back home, slightly nauseous because he should've skipped the pie, and wrestling with a dumb, pointless mix of embarrassment and tension.

"What was his problem?" He asked himself again, picking himself and his bedding up off the floor. "Just some freak after all?"

It was possible. It was _likely, _likelier than it had ever been, because even some two-bit fortune teller or clairvoyant had no reason to speak to him anymore.

If he was honest with himself, he'd admit to the kernel of disappointment that sat somewhere in the back of his mind.

"…give it up. Let it go." He said it aloud this time, grateful all over again that he left Kon with Yuzu most nights now. Not that he hated the company, but he didn't want anyone to see whatever face it was that he was making. He didn't like thinking about it himself. "It probably would have just been something annoying, anyway."

The nighttime routine was normal after that, though he made a stopover in his sisters' room to catch Karin around the waist and ruffle her hair, laughing through her affronted shouting. She sounded more and more like him each day, which made him both smile and feel a funny mix of proud and concerned. Yuzu got a kiss on the crown of her head; his father got an elbow in the sternum. Like always, Ichigo was the last one to check the doors, both upstairs and in the clinic, and the last one to put out his desk light. Tomorrow the routine would be the same, with a note to himself to avoid the old train bridge and to not talk to strangers.

Then he closed his curtains and got in bed.

Ten seconds later, he was upright, body tense, heart crashing against his ribs. His eyes, narrowed and bright with fury, flicked back to his window. He pulled one certain aside.

A man in resplendent colors watched him from the street, the silhouette of draped clothing and pinned hair clear in the circle of lamplight.

"That _bastard_…!"

There wasn't a badge to grab, not when it was both useless and put away in his bag, so Ichigo was delayed by the necessity of opening the window, and doing so slowly. No one could have fallen asleep that quickly, so if he wanted to catch the guy before –

Another glance showed him halfway to the corner. _Damnit!_

He bruised both knees and put a scrape on his arm, but he was out, down the drainpipe, and sprinting within two minutes, maybe less. He might not have been able to do much, but he could do _this_, shoes pounding against the pavement and his jacket, hastily thrown over his shirt and sweats, flapping in the chilly evening air. The street was deserted, but he knew which corner and he didn't think about anything other than putting on a burst of speed and keeping his turn tight.

For a second, he thought when he got around the wall, no one would be there.

But he got around, and there he was, and the pounding of blood in Ichigo's ears got louder and steadier. It _was _something after all, it wasn't just some freak occurrence or the universe getting a laugh at him, because the bastard was walking, steadily but slowly, and he was already more than halfway down to the next corner. _Fast. He's fast. _So fast that by the time Ichigo got to the second street, arcing around and using the streetlight for balance, he only _just _caught a slip of robe disappear down an alley between two houses. Nobody could move that quick. Nobody human.

A dull, unimportant voice in the back of his mind pointed out that he wouldn't be able to keep up, either, but he shoved it aside. He cut through his panting with a deep breath, adjusted his stance, and took off again, noting the street names and the silence. It wasn't that late, but the line of homes was dark, and the alley similarly empty, and the next two residential blocks utterly devoid of so much as a whisper of sound. It was the same for the next, and the next, homes giving way to businesses, and then to a patchwork of old projects and chain-link fences. They were just shy of hitting the outskirts of another, more industrial town when that perfect distance between them – maintained every step of the way, no matter how much speed Ichigo put on or what shortcuts he took – finally started to narrow.

When he turned the last corner, the man had stopped. Righteous anger soared up inside of Ichigo and he took the final few feet as a lunge, his hand stretching out and catching the asshole by the shoulder.

"You - ! What the hell are you even - ?!"

Up close, even in the poor lighting that was really just the moon and little else, the man was still pale, everything about him, from his skin to his hair, all lightness. The lines on his face, etched in red around his eyes and along the bridge of his nose, couldn't be makeup, but tattoos; the edges were too perfect. From a distance, Ichigo had thought his eyes were simply dark; this close, it was clear that they were blue, or a rich, deep indigo.

His expression was exactly as unruffled and unhurried as it had been under the bridge, even as Ichigo took him by his collar and shoved him up against the metal gate behind him. Distantly, he saw that they'd stopped at a high, concrete wall, closed not by a fence but by massive, rusted iron. Over the top of both he could see arched, tiled roofing, a relic of a century or two ago. If he'd had the time or attention to guess, he'd assume it was a building slated to be demolished, though why such a huge wall, and not something temporary…?

Ichigo wasn't thinking about it, though a part of him knew he should have. "Are you screwing with me? What were you doing at my house? What do you _want?_"

His jaw tightened, and got tighter when the man lifted a slender finger up to his lips.

"You should be quiet," he said, each word enunciated with a deliberate slowness. "It's. Late."

Punching someone who hadn't punched him first wasn't how you were supposed to do things, but Ichigo came very, very close.

The scream interrupted him.

* * *

**Chapter 2/5**


	3. Chapter 3

**Azuma-uta**

_As you journey on_

_beyond the lofty summit_

_of Mt. Tsukuba,_

_if you should forget me then,_

_I will never speak to you._

* * *

It had been a function to which only senior members of the household were to attend: his father, his uncle, and a branch member to serve as a record-keeper. It had been their first such service in over five hundred years; when this particular messenger had appeared the time before last, those of house Shihouin had been chosen as the delegation. When news had spread of the auspicious visitor, to be met at a location in the living world of their choosing, rumors had abounded as to whom or what he or she could be, and why. Over Soul Society's long history, those people that were not shinigami and yet had a connection to the realm of the dead had dwindled, little by little, from a countless number to a scant few, and then, in the last two hundred years, to none.

Some had chosen to disband or to sleep, returning to dwell in the hearts of mountains or in the depths of the sea. The gods of the natural world had gone thus.

Others had turned wanton and criminal, in life and in death, and were summarily punished. Shapeshifters had been the primary culprits, though there had been an odd clan of sprites and sorcerers among them.

Yet others had never been welcome at all and so had been at war or in hiding for as long as they had existed. The Quincy were the prime cautionary tale.

The last few – the bird monks, the Hare of Inaba with his bowed back and countless tales – had simply vanished.

This one was the last out of all. Their messenger was a black bird with a white belly and his missives heralded a death.

The date had been the second year by the Showa calendar when Kuchiki Byakuya had watched his father leave the manor with his uncle and his elder cousin. He'd worn the same ho and sashinuki that Byakuya did now, the cloth old but exquisitely patterned. The formal cap had, thankfully, fallen out of use in the last thousand years, but it was nonetheless a costume of ages past, not only in Soul Society but in the world of the living as well.

"Nii-sama, is this really…?"

It was the first such protest Rukia had voiced. He had felt her vibrate with discomfort and awkwardness, though her expression had stayed calm and focused in spite of the uncustomary layers of fabric – five all total, half as much as she would have worn centuries ago – wrapped around her by the expert hands of the eldest of their staff. The only brief interlude in their progression to the main senkaimon had been interrupted by Renji, who had rounded a corner in the middle of a yawn. He had stopped, narrowed his eyes, and then had retreated, shocked and choking, under the mistaken assumption that they hadn't spotted him.

Byakuya would have to speak with him on matters of proper etiquette later. "Yes."

"But isn't it unusual?" She went on, voice rising in a daring question. "This kind of formality is out of place in the living world and…and a little pointless. Why not come here? Why not meet them as shinigami?"

He spent his brief silence remembering. She'd been much more polite about asking the things he had, when he'd grumbled in the shadow of his caretakers. "It is unusual. Even when spirits other than shinigami had been plentiful, a special deference was paid to this man."

"So it _is _a man."

"He has been a man for a thousand years. Before that, only the Captain-Commander would know."

Byakuya stopped, chin upraised, and looked at the tall pillars of the gate between their world and the next. For once, the guards did not step forward, instead bowing their heads politely while he lifted his arm. The avian messenger, which had sat waiting for them atop the highest beam, alighted on his wrist. White light spilled over them, the gate cresting open on its own.

"We show him respect as per his terms because we acknowledge his power," Byakuya repeated, though his tone was many degrees less harsh than his father's had been. "He is an intermediary between our world and the human one. For many years, many spirits and not just shinigami lived here. Some few remain; you have seen them."

"Yes…and – Captain Komamura…"

He nodded once. "From time to time these spirits would be caught up in the fears and desires of humans. It happened rarely, but the results were dangerous and uncontrollable. The souls of both would intertwine and corrupt one another, until a creature never meant to exist would be born. Neither alive nor strictly dead, no power could touch such a monster except for what this man wields."

"But – " Rukia's brows crinkled, her fingers curled against her chin even as she hurried to follow him through the gate. "There are no other spirits here, as you said. Not enough to be a threat?"

"There are enough," Byakuya said and looked at her, a gravity in his expression that, in the next moment, she would come to mirror. "There are still shinigami."

"But – "

Rukia had always been very intelligent. She only had to think for a moment and realization dawned, her eyes widening before narrowing quickly, her lips pressed into a thin, tense line.

"…I see."

* * *

His back hurt.

His head hurt, too.

In fact, most of him hurt. Luckily, despite how dark it was, the cautious testing of his limbs and his past experience with injuries told Ichigo that he wasn't _seriously_ hurt. A few more scrapes and bruises were nothing to worry about, though considering how far the both of them had fallen, it was either a miracle, coincidence, or entirely on purpose that they'd survived. If he had to make an educated guess…

Ichigo's frown was severe when he climbed back to his feet, though he didn't make demands right away. Instead, he looked up in the same direction the man had, catching sight of slice of night skin at the top of a pit maybe twice as deep as he was tall. He'd caught only a brief glance when they'd tumbled inside, but apparently someone or something had seen fight to dig a pit around the decrepit building. His first impression had been correct: it was a broken down, crumbling mess from before the turn of the last century, all wooden beams and broken, tiled roofing, haphazardly patched with electrical wiring and modern piping before the builder or owner had given up on their restoration project. The grounds had long been filled in with a layer of concrete, except at some point, maybe recently, they'd broken through the surface layer and dug a…moat? A pit?

A barrier, his instinct told him, something more serious and more difficult to cross than a wall and a flimsy gate.

"So." Ichigo was calm by then and patted the dust off his clothes before he went on. "Are you going to explain?"

"Ah, yes." The man replied, broken out of his thoughts. Finally, up close and standing still, Ichigo could take full stock of him: the clothes, the tattoos, the pale skin and sandy hair. The pins he'd worn had come loose during the fall, so that most of the wavy length was down around his shoulders instead of up on his head.

His ears were long – too long, a hint too wide, and pointed at the end. _So that's how it is, huh._

Ichigo's heart pounded a little more quickly, but he waited, anticipating the slow movement of graceful hands, the tilted head and the long pause before he finally did continue to respond. "There is a mononoke here."

There were two questions to ask; the first one was the more immediate. "Here?"

"Up there." A simple finger indicated where they had fallen and, probably, the house.

"And the scream was – "

"The mononoke." A faint smile passed over his lips. "She finally let us in."

Ichigo's expression hardened and his fingers curled into tight fists. _This guy –_

A straight answer was unlikely. An answer he could _trust _was even more so. There was nothing more he could tell from him other than looking straight at him; nothing to sense, no way to sense it, just his ears and his clothing and that small, secretive smile. He was on his own, a human looking at someone or something he'd never seen before. The word _helpless _drifted across his thoughts, but he chased it away with gritted teeth. He couldn't have made it this far if that was really true and so he didn't ask. He didn't have to.

Something was wrong, someone needed help, and he was here. That was all he needed to know. It was enough. "I'm going."

Ichigo was the first to turn around and the first to put his hands on the dirt walls around them. It was tightly packed from years of supporting urban infrastructure, but punctured here and there with holes knocked out during whatever haphazard dig had put the pit there in the first place. It was slow, tentative going, with long pauses whenever the dirt began to give or slide, and Ichigo could feel a cool sweat prickling on the back of his neck. It was silent now, but a chilly wind whispered through the pit and, above his head, he could hear the creak and faint sigh of old timber. The wall around the house blocked most of the light from the street and with the occasional cloud covering the moon, the majority of the climb was done in darkness.

Saying he felt like someone was watching him would be cliché, especially when it was probably just that guy. But powers or no powers, something wasn't sitting right in the pit of his stomach. It was a feeling he _knew_, and couldn't ignore.

_Something's here. For how long? When did it get here? Why?_ The obvious answer – ghosts – felt not quite right. The war had chased most of the original spirits out of Karakura; those that were showing up now, if he had to guess, were newcomers attracted by the overwhelming residue of power left behind. The house, the pit, the gate, everything implied _age_, though hell if he knew how much. History wasn't his best subject.

Ichigo was concentrating so hard that when his head bumped against a…hand? Yes, a hand, one with long fingers and painted nails. When he felt them tap against his hair, he jerked and nearly fell, only to look up into what was becoming a familiar face.

He didn't ask this time, either. Instead, he took that hand and frowned as he felt more than saw a ripple of considerable, shocking strength. The man pulled, feet braced against the concrete and Ichigo's weight, and to anybody watching it might have looked like he was exerting a lot of effort to pull the teen back up onto solid ground. But he knew, instantly, that it was barely anything, a half effort, a _shrug_, though Ichigo was taller than him and likely heavier. _So it's like that._

"Thanks," he said, and straightened his jacket. "I guess you couldn't leave me down there, could you?"

The smile twitched and, though it was impossible to get a look at his eyes in this light, Ichigo got the impression that the man was pleased. "I could not."

"Right. Probably for the same reason you made me chase you all the way out here."

Again, the flicker of amusement, of _pleasure_. Ichigo didn't know if he should have been pissed, or a little proud. "Yes."

"Are you gonna tell me why?"

"She would not let me in."

Ichigo's frown deepened and he turned his head toward the front of the house. The front landing had, at one time, been almost finished; the flooring and the columns were the most cleanly cut, the most recent. But even those had started to fray and fade, curling and drying out after years of exposure to the sun and to the rain. The flimsy door was certainly not much better; it wasn't a barrier, and even the gate and the wall and the hole, if the guy could get back out that easily and could move as fast as he did, shouldn't have mattered.

"That sounds like bullshit."

He chuckled, the sound so oddly human that he looked at the man, sharply. "Sorry…sorry. But it's true." He spread his hands. "I am too old."

"I don't get – "

Ichigo wasn't _always _the quickest on the uptake, especially since what the guy said and how he looked didn't match up, but a few seconds of turning the gears in his head and –

"You used me as _bait?!_"

"Did I?" The expression on his face denoted the complete opposite of surprise, though he tilted his head and made a play at consideration. Ichigo felt a blood vessel come close to popping somewhere behind his eye, but he was beginning to recognize baiting when he heard it, and took in a sharp breath through his nose instead.

_Just ignore it. _"Fine. It got us in here."

"You've made a decision?"

The leap in the conversation didn't trip him up, this time. "Yeah."

Ichigo kicked at the first step, advancing when it didn't give, skipping the next when it did, and slowly but surely made his way up the landing. The door was a little better off than he expected, but it made a sharp grinding noise when he slid it aside, the old, old parts rattling ominously. Beyond it was only a floor coated in a century's worth of dust and debris, and then a stretch of inky darkness.

"I'm going in."

Behind them, the cool wind followed. Three steps in, Ichigo heard what might have been a voice, or nothing at all. Six steps in, it grew louder, an echoing, indistinct murmur of sound. Nine steps in, the meager light from the moon started to give out, blocked by the awning. "Che, should've brought a light."

There was a much more normal rustling behind him. "Like th—"

"_Don't _say it. Don't say it." Ichigo didn't turn around; the yellow-orange flickering told him all he needed to know. "Just tell me if there are any more candles. I don't care where you got them."

The man chuckled again and a long-stemmed candle, just as dust-covered and half used, was pressed into Ichigo's hand. Its holder was caked with wax, but from the shape of it, it had probably been a lantern once upon a time, though the rest of the wood and paper had rotted away. Ichigo blew lightly on the flame, carefully encouraging it brighter, and held it aloft.

The floor was just like he thought: faded and dirty, the layers and layers of grime and decay undisturbed for years. But the _walls_…

The walls were black. Shiny, and so smooth that Ichigo might not have noticed the bizarre texture to them if he hadn't leaned in for a closer inspection. What looked like paint from a distance was actually some kind of covering, rows upon rows of tightly packed threads arranged in straight, endless, unbroken lines. It was unlike any fabric he'd ever seen, with no weave to speak of and so thin that he could almost swear it wasn't cloth at all.

The smell didn't help; that up-close smell of meat.

"She's been here a very long time," the man said suddenly, and the amusement had given way to an inscrutable evenness. "She waited so peacefully that she couldn't be found."

Meat and…hell, he _knew _that smell. He knew it somehow. That creeping feeling from before came back full force, sweat dotting his palms. They were a few yards down the front hall way, no more than six, and yet when he glanced sideways he couldn't help the bone-deep feeling that the doorway was further away than what he was actually looking at. If he could still sense things, if he could still _see _things, then he would know for _sure_, but even without proof, his skin crawled with trained awareness.

On impulse, Ichigo brought the candle flame up to the wall, just long enough for the fabric to sizzle and smoke.

There. There. _That _was the smell.

It smelled like burning hair.

Ichigo heard a sharp, furious hiss, right up against his ear, and he stepped back and whirled around to face nothing, nothing at all. Only the hall, and the man, who had in one hand a lantern and in the other a bizarre, jeweled toy, all white and gold with upraised wings. His eyes flicked then to the door, to the innocuously small distance between them, the exit, the landing, the pit, and the gate.

"…how long have we been inside?"

"Since we fell."

"How far in?"

"Far enough that she could show herself with confidence."

A trap, then. A trap from the beginning. He thought on it for only a second or two, and then squared his shoulders, twisting his neck to loosen muscles that had gone tight with unease. "So you can see what I can't. But you can't get any further if I'm not here. Is that right?"

"Ah. Yes."

"That's fine."

The faint, faint surprise on the man's face felt like a victory. Ichigo found a grin in him, and swung around to look down the far hall.

"Let's go."

* * *

**Chapter 3/5**


End file.
